For too long, American healthcare has organized itself around the hospital, says Eric Tower, a veteran healthcare attorney and advisor who believes that costly model is no longer sustainable and must change.
“You don't have to be treated in the hospital,” he told me. “You can be treated in a less intensive environment. And that can be just about anything.”
Tower has spent 35 years in healthcare law, working on acquisitions, reimbursement, fraud and abuse, and strategy, and also serving inside a major health system with responsibility for its medical group and mergers and acquisitions. He previously served as an executive and senior in-house counsel for the largest healthcare system in Illinois.
What Tower sees is a system whose old boundaries no longer hold. He told me healthcare used to be far more fragmented, with clearer lines between who paid, who delivered care, and where care happened. Now those lines are breaking down as insurers, physician groups, health systems, and specialty platforms expand across the continuum.
“If you insist on serving just as a standalone,” he warned, “you're likely to see people encroach in who you never imagined coming in.”
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"Why You Should Not Go to the Hospital," by Lou Sokolovskiy was published in Opus Connect on June 10, 2026.